On September 19 the county clerks mailed the first general-election ballots in New Jersey. Some of them are already back. Every one that comes back is a voter your campaign should stop talking to.
That is the whole shift. Until the nineteenth, the job was reaching people. From here to November 3, a large part of it is removing them: from turf, from call queues, from the mail file, from the text list. A field program that is reading the returns should get smaller every morning. If your universes are the same size today as they were on the eighteenth, the program isn’t reading the returns.
Who comes back first
The first ballots back come from the permanent vote-by-mail list, and the first of those come from the voters who were always going to vote. They were at the top of your turnout score before a single ballot went out. An early surge of returns from your supporters feels like momentum. Mostly it is your base doing what your base does.
Read the early numbers for what they tell you about the file, not the race. Does the ballot-status match hit the voters you expected? Are supporters on the list showing up as mailed? If the match is off now, fix it this week, while the list is small enough to check by hand.
Take banked voters out of everything
A returned ballot should pull a voter out of every contact channel the same day it shows up in the county data. Doors and phones are the easy part if your universes are definitions rather than snapshots. Mail is harder. A piece that drops in mid-October was addressed when it went to the printer, so every mail drop from here on needs a suppression pass against the latest returns before the file goes to the vendor. Budget a day for it in every mail schedule.
Paid digital lists, text programs, and volunteer phone banks working off exported sheets all need the same pass. The export is where banked voters come back to life.
Work the chase from the bottom
The chase universe is every supporter holding a ballot who hasn’t returned it. Sort it by turnout score, lowest first. A high-propensity supporter will find the drop box without you. A supporter who has voted once in the last four general elections has a ballot on the kitchen counter and every chance of leaving it there.
Each contact is small: the ballot came, sign the certificate on the envelope, and here is the nearest drop box. Callers should have the actual address, not a county map. Recontact on a schedule, not once. A supporter who said “I’ll mail it this weekend” goes back in the queue for the following Tuesday.
Cure letters get the same-day treatment we planned for in August. A flagged ballot is a vote already cast, one form away from counting.
The supporters without a ballot
Everyone not on the permanent list is still on the old calendar, and they have three deadlines left:
- October 13: registration closes. Keep the registration check in every script until then.
- October 24 through November 1: in-person early voting.
- October 27: last day a mailed vote-by-mail application can reach the clerk.
The application deadline looks generous, and it isn’t. An application mailed in late October has to reach the clerk, get processed, go back out as a ballot, and come home again before the chase can do anything with it. For a low-propensity supporter who isn’t on the list today, the early-voting week is usually the cleaner ask: a place, a date, and a machine.
What to check each morning
Through November 3, the morning numbers are three counts: ballots returned among your supporters, supporters still holding a ballot, and supporters with no ballot at all. The first should grow, the second should shrink faster than it refills, and the third is your early-voting and Election Day program.
In Romulus, ballot status loads into the voter file and the chase universe re-sorts itself as returns land. However you run it, the test is the same: by the end of October, the list of people you still need to reach should be short enough to finish.